Third Thursday Poetry Series featuring Alabama poet laureate

The public is invited to the Third Thursday Poetry Series at Pebble Hill, featuring Tina Mozelle Braziel and state poet laureate Ashley M. Jones, on Thursday, Nov. 18, at 6:30 p.m. Refreshments and book sales will be available at 6 p.m.

Tina Mozelle Braziel, author of Known by Salt (Anhinga Press) and Rooted by Thirst (Porkbelly Press), has been awarded the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, an Alabama State Council on the Arts literary fellowship, the Magic City Poetry Festival’s first eco-poetry fellowship, and an artist residency at Hot Springs National Park. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Southern Humanities Review, Tampa Review, and other journals. She earned her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Oregon. She directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop for high school students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She and her husband, novelist James Braziel, live and write in a glass cabin that they are building by hand on Hydrangea Ridge.

Ashley M. Jones was recently named Alabama state poet laureate. She received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, or FIU, where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, Night Owl, The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, pluck!, Fjords Review: Black American Edition and PMSPoemMemoirStory, where her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. She was an editor of PANK Magazine. Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and it won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her second book, dark // thing, won the 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press. Her third collection, REPARATIONS NOW! is forthcoming in fall 2021 from Hub City Press. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, board member of the Alabama Writers Cooperative and the Alabama Writers Forum, co-director of PEN Birmingham. She is on the Creative Writing Faculty of the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

The Third Thursday Poetry Series at Pebble Hill is sponsored by the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities, Department of English, and Southern Humanities Review in the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University; the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Auburn University and the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

The Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities at Pebble Hill is located at 101 S. Debardeleben Street in Auburn. For more information about the series, visit here.